Professor Hans-Joachim Freund, director of the Fritz-Haber-Institut of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany, will be awarded the Karl Ziegler Prize by the German Chemical Society (GDCh). The award is endowed with € 50,000 and will be presented at the opening of the Chemical Science Forum in Bremen, Germany, on 4 September 2011.

Freund will receive the award for his outstanding work on understanding the molecular basis of heterogeneous catalysis. His research focuses on the physics and chemistry of solid surfaces, in particular, the controlled preparation of metal oxide films, their characterization and application in ultrahigh vacuum and under ambient conditions. He is also interested in the development of model systems for heterogeneous catalysis, nanostructures, and clusters.

Freund was born in 1951 in Solingen, Germany, and studied physics and chemistry at the University of Cologne, Germany. After his graduation in 1978, he worked as a Fellow of the German Research Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He obtained his Habilitation in Chemical Physics at the University of Cologne in 1983. He was appointed as C2 professor at the-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. In 1987, he was appointed to a C4-professorship in Bochum, Germany. He has been a scientific member and the director of the Fritz Haber Institute since 1996.

• CO + NO vs CO + O₂ Reaction on Monolayer FeO(111) Films on Pt(111)
  Y. Lei, M. Lewandowski, Y.-N. Sun, Y. Fujimori, Y. Martynova et al.,
  ChemCatChem 2011, 3, 671-674.
  DOI: 10.1002/cctc.201000388
• Activation of Oxygen on MgO: O₂˙ˉ Radical Ion Formation on Thin, Metal-supported MgO(001) Films
  A. Gonchar, T. Risse, H.-J. Freund, L. Giordano, C. Di Valentin, G. Pacchioni,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 2635 –2638.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.201005729
• Innovative Measurement Techniques in Surface Science
  H.-J. Freund, N. Nilius, T. Risse, S. Schauermann, T. Schmidt,
  ChemPhysChem 2011, 12, 79-87.
  DOI: 10.1002/cphc.201000812

See also:

• Wolfram Koch on the GDCh’s Top Event
  Wolfram Koch, Executive Director, GDCh, talks about the Wissenschaftsforum Chemie 2011 in Bremen, Germany
  
• Andreas Pfaltz Gives Heilbronner Hückel Lecture
• Ferdi Schüth Receives the Wöhler Prize
• François Diederich Recieves Baeyer Medal
• Peter Bruce Wins Arfvedson Schlenk Prize
• GDCh-Wissenschaftsforum Chemie 2011: Chemie schafft Zukunft